Firstly I think the feature is a great idea and is working pretty well for a prototype.
Ideally the feature needs to do at least 3 things:
Get questions noticed
Get questions answered well
Present good Q/A combinations to the community
The current practice of promoting interesting questions to frontpage does the first but could be detrimental to the other 2 - many users will see the question but not get round to reopening and looking at the answers. This encourages people to answer quickly to get their response read and discourages more detailed answers.
If you’re planning on developing the feature further then addressing this issue would really help get the best out of it. One option would be the ability to promote the best answer(s) to frontpage after a week or so.
I don’t know how difficult it would be, but if users could mark a comment as a possible answer, so it would be reviewed by admins, that might mean admins don’t have to read all the comments to see if any should be answers.
Firstly I think the feature is a great idea and is working pretty well for a prototype.
Ideally the feature needs to do at least 3 things:
Get questions noticed
Get questions answered well
Present good Q/A combinations to the community
The current practice of promoting interesting questions to frontpage does the first but could be detrimental to the other 2 - many users will see the question but not get round to reopening and looking at the answers. This encourages people to answer quickly to get their response read and discourages more detailed answers.
If you’re planning on developing the feature further then addressing this issue would really help get the best out of it. One option would be the ability to promote the best answer(s) to frontpage after a week or so.
I don’t know how difficult it would be, but if users could mark a comment as a possible answer, so it would be reviewed by admins, that might mean admins don’t have to read all the comments to see if any should be answers.